Bessette Lili is Crying

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80427-168-1
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette's debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette's stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love - of desire run cold - and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette's singular take on the 'poetic novel'. This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette's work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.

Hélène Bessette (1918-2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Cazes prize in 1954 and was twice in the running for the Goncourt prize and the Médicis prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bessette, Hélène

Weitere Mitwirkende

Briggs, Kate

Leseproben

introduction
by eimear mcbride

Right from its furious start, streams of words, like tears or rain, flood down the pages of Lili is Crying. ‘Hell damnation, cruelty, lies, deceit, betrayal, tears, severances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death’ is as perfectly representative of what’s to follow in Hélène Bessette’s strange – and strangely made – tale of mother/daughter/hate/love/suffocation/resentment and chronic mutual dependence, as a novel’s first line can get.

Born to a divorced taxi driver and a perfumer in the French commune of Levallois-Perret in 1918, Bessette took a winding route to publication. Having first trained as a schoolteacher, she married in 1939, gave birth to two children, and spent a three-year sojourn in New Caledonia at the side of her evangelizing – and unfaithful – pastor husband. It appears that, on her return to France, now recently divorced and with custody of one child, the time had finally come for a little evangelizing of her own. Not of the God type but of the literary type, and Raymond Queneau – novelist, poet and co-founder of the formally experimental Oulipo group – was one of Bessette’s early converts. After, purportedly, uttering a laudatory ‘At last, something new!’ he signed her up to a ten-book deal at Gallimard – in the face of competition from Seuil, one of their biggest rivals – and set about trying to persuade literary France that Bessette would soon be recognized as one of its greatest twentieth-century novelists. The writer-critics Alain Bosquet and Claude Mauriac agreed, and others soon followed suit. Unmoved by the approbation of the establishment, however, Bessette stoically retained her independence and disdained all attempts to affiliate herself, or her work, with any of the popular literary movements of the day. Instead, she set about Lili is Crying – with its infamously monstering subject of poisonous mother-daughter relationships – with ideas of her own. The outcome was what the author herself labelled ‘le roman poetique’. But while Bessette’s fusing of a deceptively unshowy linguistic style with high emotion certainly earns the right to call itself ‘poetic’, Lili is Crying encompasses rather more than traditional notions of the ‘poetic’ tend to admit. Belying its relative concision, and carrying a complex web of riches within the text, it hits the page with the kind of unsentimental bravado and formal indiscipline that only early novels wrench from their authors.

The book’s inciting opening sentence is uttered by Lili’s cousin, the shepherd, as he drives his flock downhill to escape the mistral-fuelled storm. An unsettling ‘Angel of Fate’ type of character, the unnamed shepherd reappears throughout the narrative in a variety of guises, from observer to prophet, confidante, and, eventually, lover. Ever present in the background, he seems oblivious to his role as harbinger of change, right up until the moment he actively refuses it. However, having crossed the threshold of his violent opening execration, the reader is promptly plunged into the petit bourgeois cosiness of 1940s Provence. Here Lili’s mother, Charlotte, holds court – and the reins – from within the tastefully decorated walls of her highly respectable boarding house.

‘Lili, Lili! calls the mother Charlotte.’ Making sure that forty-year-old Lili, her prized possession, is safe indoors from the sudden rain. Which she is. But Lili is crying, and we’ll soon know more about that. In the meantime we learn that Charlotte, while the proprietress of her establishment, is no menial – after all, her father was a ‘de’, which means she is ‘naturally better than other people’. We are then introduced to our twin anti-heroines via Charlotte’s litany of prim observations about their inarguably lovely life – a life her good taste, business acumen and thrift have provided. For the coddled and cossetted Lili however – ‘Your ribbons and your Sunday dresses.’ ‘You always were prettier and better than the other children.’ – the charm of their life together falls short of those offered by the young man with whom she has fallen in love. Ignoring her mother’s unyielding disdain for such frivolities – ‘You have plenty of time to get married. You’re too young’ – and repeated reminders of the utter domestic bliss in which they already dwell, she heads out into the Provençal evening and, with her friend’s encouragement, spends an evening with her lover. But, when the scene changes Lili is, once again, crying. Her young man has given up everything for her and yet she finds she cannot do the same for him. ‘You can’t break my life like this, sobs the young man. Everyone has a mother, but we don’t all smash up our lives for her sake.’ Except that this is precisely what Lili does, and so unsuccessfully brings to a close the first of her many attempts to escape maternal dominance. In the years to come, she will have ample cause to regret her choice, not least because of the bottomless well of misandry this near abandonment creates in Charlotte, from which her relentless admonishments will ever after be drawn.

— Here is my daughter, returned to me, says the mother

Charlotte.

My lost daughter.

My found daughter.

My daughter who runs away with her zip-up bag.

Here is my deceiving daughter.

My cheating daughter.

Who has no qualms about telling me silly stories

and lies.

And on it goes.

Bad girl.

Bit of nothing girl.

Bold girl.

Whore.

Street-walker.

Girl turned out badly.

Girl gone crazy.

Over a boy.

Stupid girl.

And what about your mother?

Your mother Charlotte?

Accompanied by a chorus of Lili’s gossipy, but well-meaning, small-town friends the reader then passes through the years of Lili’s youth, only dropping into narrative specifics when events necessitate. For instance, Charlotte’s bitter self-reproach when the unusual purchase of new underwear appears to have aided a further absconding decampment.

No, I never buy her underwear!

Superfluous.

For once, I bought her underwear.

I should have known that something was up.

This time however, Lili’s desertion is a conscious effort, made more as a bid for freedom than in hot pursuit of young love. ‘It’s like this, cries Lili, I refuse to go off with the man I do love. Instead, I go off with the man I don’t love.’ Ironically, on this occasion Lili finds herself pregnant. So, while Charlotte huffily bemoans the cost of hiring staff to help out at the boarding house in her absence, Lili undergoes an illegal abortion which she barely survives. Her lover nurses her in the aftermath and if her friends find him somewhat underwhelming – ‘His heavy manner has none of the lightness of a man who’d elope with a girl.’ – they also counsel her that a child would have been just the trick to cut the cord and reset Lili’s relationship with her mother on an adult footing. But, still pinioned by her fear of Charlotte’s disapprobation, Lili confesses ‘I didn’t think of that, I forgot everything, I even forgot about the child, I didn’t even think about it being a child, all I could think of was what she would say, and I was afraid.’ Nevertheless, and perhaps because she is now – albeit accidentally – on something of a roll, Lili forges ahead and marries her unremarkable lover. Although the newlyweds stay well away from her hometown, and the separation from her mother grows, it’s not long before Lili is crying again anyway.

— If only I did love him, wails Lili.

And she sobs.

But I don’t love him, naturally.

Trapped in her enraged and betrayed isolation, Mother Charlotte also berates herself.

There are so many ways to love a daughter.

And how well she could have loved her daughter, that

mother Charlotte.

There are thirty-six right ways.

(But she chose the thirty-seventh.)

In spite of this period of separation, the mother-daughter bond still fails to snap and, eventually, Lili returns with husband in tow and their shared plans to open a gas station, with a restaurant, at a newly acquired property down the road. Charlotte is delighted to see her daughter again but very much not pleased to make the acquaintance of her ‘Slav’ husband. Not only does he speak imperfect French but dares to do so with a strong accent. Suffice to say, his every friendly overture to Lili’s mother is rejected, with ever increasing levels of vindictiveness. Happily for Charlotte World War Two soon intervenes....